乘坐纜索鐵路到大都會公園(Parque Metropolitano)山頂遊玩，似乎是遊客們必選的經典旅遊項目。回到山下時，我們距離La Chascona只有一個街區。那是聶魯達1951年為秘密情人瑪蒂爾德·烏魯蒂亞(Matilde Urrutia)購買的房產（他那時仍與第二任妻子德里婭·德爾卡里爾[Delia del Carril]保持着婚姻關係）。或許值得一看吧，但我也沒抱太高期望。
我在旅行時參觀過不少名人故居，結果總是發現，我最渴望一睹為快的東西（藝術家主人的畫作、她的書桌或畫室）要麼已經變賣，要麼送到了博物館。拋開藝術家不談，多數時候，你能看到的只是一些房間還有舊傢具（但有一個例外：弗里達·卡羅[Frida Kahlo]在墨西哥城的故居藍房子[Casa Azul]）。
我打算在禮品商店選一本聶魯達的詩集。在旅行的最後幾個晚上，我向吉姆提議，我們為對方大聲讀詩，或許還可以背誦幾首，花些時間研習西班牙語。除此之外，還可以做點浪漫的事。還有誰比聶魯達更能撩撥情慾呢？
吉姆知道，我不可救藥地痴迷於收藏，被別人視作垃圾的某些東西，我卻視若珍寶。如今，在榮獲諾貝爾獎的智利詩人、左翼支持者聶魯達的家中，我好像發現了一個志趣相投的人。
我甚至還沒有踏進前門，僅僅看到裡面的花園時，心情就立刻激動起來，彷彿遇到了一家格外吸引人的古董商店，或者是一場似乎能淘到寶貝的庭院舊貨甩賣。這裡具備了此類事物的全部特徵。
我還有另一個發現：一個與聶魯達的詩歌並非毫無關聯的元素。如果他與瑪蒂爾德的感情就像他詩歌里描述的那樣，是他生命中的摯愛，那麼這所房子就是二人演繹這場戀情的舞台。「這裡是麵包，酒，餐桌，寓所，」他在《愛情十四行詩一百首》寫道，「男人的，女人的以及生活的必需品。」
在門口，我看到了各色的鍛鐵戶外傢具和鑲嵌瓷磚、繪着飛鳥和藤蔓的拱門、手工鍛造的旋轉樓梯、來自船舶浮標的玻璃球、橘子樹和天使雕像。這時我就意識到，無論我多麼喜愛聶魯達的詩歌，真正拉近我與這位已故40多年的詩人距離的，是他對室內裝飾的品味。
La Chascona（指的是瑪蒂爾德狂亂的頭髮，聶魯達詩歌中反覆出現的元素）是我最喜歡的那種住宅——那是一個男人新奇、古怪、誇張的創造，每件物品對他來說都承載着深刻的情感意義——不是因為它們的內在價值或傳統美感，而是因為它詮釋了創造者的夢想。
這裡也是一個真正浪漫的居所，總是能聽到鳥兒的鳴唱，蜿蜒穿過宅院的潺潺水聲，叮叮噹噹的鐘聲，到處是具有象徵意義的物件、護身符和給愛人的私密訊息，（我猜想）來訪者只能解讀其中很小一部分。直到我參觀的當天，我只知道聶魯達寫過《二十首情詩》。但這所房子本身就是一首情詩。
La Chascona一點也不像弗吉尼亞的蒙蒂塞洛莊園，或者凡爾賽宮。它也不像波士頓的伊莎貝拉·斯圖爾特·加德納(Isabella Stewart Gardner)之家，那裡如今是一間很棒的博物館，是我的最愛。與這些地方不同，你不會在室內裝潢作品中找到聶魯達的房間設計——這裡沒有路易十六時期風格的扶手椅，也沒有品位高雅但毫無新意的組合傢具。在聶魯達的房子里，你會在頭頂發現一隻火烈鳥的標本，看到一匹真實大小的銅馬，或是一隻比實物大50倍的男鞋。
我發現我愛極了這些裝飾品。《建築學文摘》(Architectural Digest)中的房屋設計或許很美，但我希望房間能夠講述居住者的故事，展示出幽默感、戲劇性，還有最重要的，再現一個充滿激情的靈魂。
聶魯達是一名感官主義者。這一點在他的詩歌中顯露無疑：「我渴望你的雙唇，你的聲音，你的頭髮。安靜而饑渴地，我遊盪街頭。麵包滋養不了我，黎明讓我分裂，一整天我搜尋你兩腳流動的音響。」
在他居住的空間也能看出這一點。邁入低矮狹窄的過道，進入餐廳，我們就可以知道：住在這裡的人熱愛美食。餐桌很長，擺放着英式瓷器和墨西哥的玻璃器皿，以及造型怪異又精美的碟子，椅子擺放得格外密集，顯示出曾經的親密和融洽。
聶魯達的座位一目了然：當然是坐在主人的位置。通過語音嚮導，我得知他喜歡為聚會盛裝打扮。他收藏了各種禮帽，有時會畫鬍子。他喜歡通過一個專門的小門進場。廚房一直是嚴格的禁區。魔術師如果想吸引觀眾，就不會展示魔術是怎麼變出來的。
我這裡只能列舉一小部分特色鮮明的傢具和物品。有些東西單獨來看可能很醜，甚至有點庸俗。但正如藝術家約瑟夫·康奈爾(Joseph Cornell)所說，藝術在組合中誕生。
在La Chascona，我們發現了裝裱簡陋的卡拉瓦喬作品的複製品，毛絨動物玩具，60年代風格的福米加(Formica)傢具塑料貼面，還有一個大眼睛的活動雕塑（也是純粹的1960年代），旁邊放着幾張非洲面具。這裡還有一隻法國皮沙發，萊熱(Léger)的原版瓷器頭像，以及聶魯達的友人迭戈·里維拉(Diego Rivera)為瑪蒂爾德製作的雕像，亮點是讓這座房屋得名的她美杜莎似的紅髮。
進入卧室之後，我突然覺得自己不應該出現在這裡。這名男子對這個女人的感情似乎太過強烈，以至於一群遊客闖進來，帶着耳機走來走去，顯得很不應該（兩個幸福的戀人做一個麵包，一個月亮落在草地上。他寫道，「行走，他們拋下了兩個影子一起流動；醒來，他們留下一個太陽空虛在床」）。
我們原計劃把剩下的時間留給聖地亞哥。但是在得知聶魯達還有另外兩處故居，以及他和瑪蒂爾德在他人生最後20年住在那裡之後，我就像着了魔一樣。我向吉姆提議（不，比提議更加迫切）去參觀這兩處故居——一處是瓦爾帕萊索的La Sebastiana，另一處是Isla Negra，建在智利岩石遍布的海岸上，距離前一個有幾小時的路程。
吉姆喜歡開車，而且喜歡開得很快，因此我們選擇了一輛頂級的寶馬285M敞篷車。我們很激動，至少我是這樣。這在某種程度上是一次浪漫的探險（有點像《儷人行》[Two for the Road]，只不過少了艾爾伯特·芬尼[Albert Finney]和奧黛麗·赫本[Audrey Hepburn]）。我想要把見證了巴勃羅和瑪蒂爾德愛情的三處故居全部參觀一遍。但是實際上，我真正想了解的是他們的故事。
我們開着車向瓦爾帕萊索進發，一路上是迷人的鄉村風光，包括許多智利的釀酒廠。沿着高速路行駛了20英里後，天好像要下雨，我們都有些筋疲力盡，但即便如此，我仍然忍不住去想像巴勃羅和瑪蒂爾德如何放棄了在首都的可愛家園，來到佛羅里達山高處這個陌生的地方。這所住宅俯瞰着瘋狂的瓦爾帕萊索港市。在這座城市，沒有兩條街道是平行的，許多車道是單行道，卻沒有指示牌。
La Sebastiana是1959年從建築師塞巴斯蒂安·科利亞(Sebastián Collado)手中購買的房產，後者在房子完工之前去世。房屋以他的名字命名。儘管聶魯達為了給情人驚喜，獨自購買了La Chascona， La Sebastiana卻是他和瑪蒂爾德（第三任妻子）共同購買的。他們在1961年慶祝房屋竣工，舉辦了一場著名的晚宴，在隨後的新年慶祝活動中，友人們聚集在海港觀看了焰火。
我們花了一個下午和晚上遊覽了瓦爾帕萊索——吉姆說，這個令人沉醉的地方好像是新奧爾良和舊金山的結合，又混合了一點巴黎拉丁區的味道：一家提供皮斯科酸酒的潛水酒吧里播放着30年代爵士樂，石子路彎彎曲曲通向河邊，壁畫和纜索鐵路，茂盛得溢出了花盆的鮮花；在路上遊盪的狗。
第二天早上，我們來到了La Sebastiana。與La Chascona一樣，聶魯達的這處房子也有一個長滿了盤根錯節植物的入口，以及鑲嵌着馬賽克瓷磚的走廊，秘密花園，樓梯間，低矮的門和天花板，讓人感覺好像在一條船上——這正是聶魯達的設想。儘管他從來沒興趣真正駕馭一條船，房子裏海洋的主題無處不在。
這也是一個完全被吧台佔據的房間，餐桌上擺放了更多的彩色玻璃杯，床尾有一張瑪蒂爾德的梳妝台，聶魯達在晚年買的一隻綿羊玩具，用來代替幾十年前當他還是一個失去母親的孩子時，丟失過的一隻心愛玩具。
屋裡還有一隻旋轉木馬和一個音樂盒，一套木船收藏品，幾張地圖（其中一張可追溯到17世紀）。聶魯達給自己打造了一間美妙的寫作室，到處是這位詩人與名人朋友（其中有畢加索[Picasso]和馬歇·馬叟[Marcel Marceau]）以及傑出作家（埃德加·愛倫·坡[Edgar Allan Poe]、沃爾特·惠特曼[Walt Whitman]）的合影，還有他1971年榮獲諾貝爾獎時拍攝的照片。
就像他的其他住所一樣，辦公空間的亮點是一系列的青銅手部雕像，桌子旁邊有一個水槽，讓他可以保持寫作之前洗手的習慣。他的房間明確地告訴參觀者：如果說這位詩人對美食、愛、船模和葡萄酒有着無法滿足的強烈慾望，他同樣擁有良好的職業精神。
他在清早寫作。下午時間留出來會朋友，搜羅寶貝，我不禁想像，如果那個時代就有eBay，聶魯達的生活會是怎樣。或許他的家裡會有更多青銅手部雕塑和船畫。他的詩作應該會減少。
距離我們飛回家還有一天時間，我們回到了車上，前往海邊，打算下午參觀聶魯達的最後一處故居，然後返回到市裡搭乘飛機。我們的時間有點緊（吉姆一度飆出了120英里的時速），但仍然義無反顧地出發了。
通向Isla Negra的路上會經過一系列小城鎮，然後才能到海邊。即使在我們抵達了那裡，要找到那棟房子也不容易。在這個普通的海濱小鎮，到處是廉價的餐館和紀念品商店，卻沒有指示牌昭告它的存在。
按照一個當地的士司機的建議，我們沿着一段土路開了半英里左右，出了城。終於找到了它，在一片石頭上，俯瞰着一片咆哮的海洋，濤聲太大，吉姆不得不提高嗓門，我才能聽見他。這就是聶魯達最喜歡的家：Isla Negra.
這棟房子是他為妻子德里婭·德爾卡里爾（昵稱小螞蟻）買的。他聲稱自己要找一個地方寫《漫歌集》(Canto General)。但是可以說，一個人要寫一首詩章，何需滿屋子的瓶中船模和幾百個玻璃瓶子。
這裡仍然有餐櫃和龐大的餐桌，巨大的壁爐和柔軟深陷的椅子（俯視着洶湧的大西洋），寫作室，還有一間通過一段特殊階梯方可抵達的浪漫卧室——實際上是兩間卧室；當巴勃羅聶魯達跟德里婭離婚並娶了瑪蒂爾德時，新的愛人需要一個新房間。在Isla Negra，不會游泳的聶魯達對與海洋有關的物品更加痴迷，起居室的牆上有十幾個裝飾船頭的女性人像。
每年的9月18日，聶魯達都和許多友人在這裡慶祝智利獨立日。也是在這裡，他得知了1973年9月的政變推翻了社會主義盟友薩爾瓦多·阿連德(Salvador Allende)政府，以及阿連德在政變當天自殺的消息。
聶魯達死後，瑪蒂爾德沒有在Isla Negra住過一個晚上；她回到聖地亞哥，在La Chascona度過了餘生。不過首先，她必須進行重建，就像這座城鎮一樣，房子在政變之後遭到了軍方成員的洗劫和破壞。
如今，參觀者不會知道，聶魯達精心收藏的寶貝和傢具在那些最初的日子裡曾被損毀和燒掉。劫難後拍攝的一些照片講述了當時的故事——對房屋的破壞，數千人走上街頭哀悼他們愛戴的詩人。在照片里，默哀的群眾中包括瑪蒂爾德的身影，她的頭髮藏在黑色的面紗之下。10年之後，她死於癌症，被葬在Isla Negra，丈夫的旁邊。
在回家的飛機上，我拿出了在La Chascona禮品店買的詩集。其中一本包含了我非常熟悉的《二十首情詩》，以及聶魯達匿名出版的詩句，它們表達着詩人在50年代初對秘密情人瑪蒂爾德的愛。
另一本是有843頁的厚書，內容包括聶魯達的每一首頌歌，書頁的一側是西班牙文，另一側是英文（《洋薊頌》[Ode to the Artichoke]、《字典頌》[Ode to the Dictionary]、《致沃爾特·惠特曼》[Ode to Walt Whitman]、《西服頌》[Ode to My Suit]：「每天早晨，西服，你在椅子上等待被我的虛榮、愛、希望、身體填滿。」他寫這225首頌歌再合適不過，因為他如此喜愛各種物件，不是因為它們的價值，而是因為它們的象徵意義）。
我不是詩人，也不是詩評家，當我在背包里裝滿了聶魯達的作品，向北飛躍南美洲的時候，我突然在想，並非聶魯達所有的詩歌都如此偉大或令人印象深刻。詩人少寫一點可能會更好。他美妙的住宅里如果只有現在十分之一的收藏，仍然是值得參觀的好地方。說不定還會更加賞心悅目。
然而在生與死之間，在我看來也不乏這樣的光輝時刻：在一張精美的圓桌前，人們舉起紅色的墨西哥玻璃酒杯，桌上是鍍金的瓷器，燭光搖曳生姿，樂聲悠揚，主人戴着菲斯帽，他美艷的紅髮嬌妻在耳邊輕聲訴說情話。她的玉頸上戴着一串稀有的珍珠，船頭雕像中的女子豐滿的胸脯裂衣欲出。屋內高朋滿座，而屋外，煙花在洶湧的海面上紛繁綻放。
本文最初發表於2015年12月20日。
翻譯：王湛The idea of paying a visit to Pablo Neruda’s home in Santiago had come as an afterthought. My husband, Jim, and I had been traveling through Chile, with a single day to spend in the capital.
Riding the funicular to the top of Parque Metropolitano, the classic tourist activity, seemed like a requirement. When we got to the bottom again, it deposited us a block away from La Chascona, the house the poet bought in 1951 (while still married to his second wife, Delia del Carril) for his then-secret lover, Matilde Urrutia. A promising stop, perhaps, but I kept my expectations low.
I’ve taken a fair number of house tours on my travels — often discovering that all the things I’d most like to see (the artist’s paintings, her desk or painting studio) were either sold off or sent to museums. Take the artist out of the house and what you are likely to have, more often than not, is a collection of rooms and some old furniture. (One striking exception: Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo’s house in Mexico City.)
My intention was to pick up a book of Neruda’s poetry at the gift shop. These last few nights on our trip, I suggested to Jim, he and I could read poems out loud to each other and maybe memorize a few. We’d devote some time to our Spanish. That, and romance. Who better to fan the flames than Neruda?
The moment I stepped into the garden at La Chascona, I revised my plan. “I’m going to need to spend a lot of time here,” I whispered to Jim, checking my watch. I was already concerned that the two hours left before closing time might not be sufficient.
Jim knows that I am an incurable collector of the kind of things some people may call junk. I call them treasures. Now, at the home of Neruda, the Nobel-winning Chilean poet and champion of the left, I had discovered a kindred spirit.
I hadn’t even gotten through the front door of this house, but already, just at the sight of the garden, my heart was racing the way it does when I encounter a particularly enticing junk store, or a salvage yard, or a promising-looking yard sale. And this place possessed qualities of all those.
But something else, too: an element not unrelated to Neruda’s poetry. If his relationship with Matilde was, as he represented it in his poems, the great love of his life, this house was the stage set against which he envisioned the two of them playing it out. “Here are the bread — the wine — the table — the house,” he wrote in “One Hundred Love Sonnets.” “A man’s needs, and a woman’s, and a life’s.”
What I recognized, even at the entryway — with its ragtag assemblage of wrought-iron garden furniture and mosaic tile inlays, the mural of birds and vines winding around the arched door, the hand-forged circular staircase and glass balls from ships’ buoys and orange trees and sculptures of angels — was that whatever fondness I might feel for Neruda’s poetry, my truest kinship with this man who died over 40 years ago would be with his sense of interior decoration.
In fact, “interior decoration” is an insufficient phrase. As much as he was a poet, Neruda was a collector of things, a builder of homes and a designer of fantastical spaces.
La Chascona (the name refers to the wild tangle of Matilde’s hair, a recurring element in his poems) is the kind of house I love best — the fabulous, wacky, excessive creation of a man for whom objects took on deep emotional meaning — not necessarily for their intrinsic value, and possibly not for their conventional beauty either, but as an expression of the dreams of the person who assembled them.
This place is also — with its never-ending birdsong, the trickling waterfall meandering through the property, the tinkling chimes — the home of a true romantic, filled with symbols and talismans and secret messages to his lover, only a fraction of which (I’m guessing) will any visitor comprehend. Up to the day of my visit, all I knew was that Neruda had written “Veinte Poemas de Amor.” But this whole house was a love poem.
La Chascona bears no resemblance to places like Monticello, in Virginia, or Versailles, or — a personal favorite — the Isabella Stewart Gardner home in Boston, now a great museum. Unlike those places, you won’t find the rooms designed by Neruda in books of great interior design — no Louis XVI chairs, or tasteful but predictable furniture groupings. In a Neruda house, you may find a taxidermied flamingo overhead, or a life-size bronze horse, or a 50-times-larger-than-life-size man’s shoe.
And that’s what I found myself loving. Those houses out of Architectural Digest may be lovely, but give me a room that tells something about the person who lived there — a room that displays a sense of humor, a sense of drama, and most important, a passionate soul.
Neruda was a sensualist. You can see it in his poetry: “I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps. …”
But you can also see it in his living spaces. One step through the low, narrow entry to the dining room and we knew: The man who lived here loved to eat. The dining table is long, and set with English china and Mexican glassware, wonderful odd serving dishes, chairs arranged surprisingly close, in a way that suggests warmth and conviviality.
It’s clear where Neruda must have presided: at the head. From my audio tour, I learned that he favored dressing up for parties. He kept a collection of hats for these occasions, and sometimes he might paint on a mustache. He liked to make an entrance, through a small special door opening into the room. The kitchen remained strictly off-limits. A magician does not display how the magic is made to happen if he wants to maintain the fantasy.
I can list here only a fraction of the furnishings and objects that stood out. By themselves, some might appear ugly — even tacky. But as the collage artist Joseph Cornell could have told us, art happens in the assemblage.
At La Chascona we found reproductions of a cheaply framed Caravaggio, stuffed animals, ’60s-style Formica and a mobile (also pure 1960s) featuring staring eyes, mounted alongside African masks. There was also a leather couch from France, an original ceramic head by Léger and a portrait of Matilde by Neruda’s friend Diego Rivera, commemorating the Medusa-like red hair that gave La Chascona its name.
When we got to the bedroom, I had the sense that I shouldn’t be in this place. The passion of the man for this particular woman seemed too great for a parade of tourists to pass through with headsets. (“Two happy lovers make one bread, a single moon drop in the grass,” he wrote. “Walking they cast two shadows that flow together; waking, they leave one sun empty in their bed.”).
The bed is covered with a simple white cloth. On the dressing table: a bottle of Chanel No. 5 and a hand mirror, not a lot more. Still, a scent of passion emanates.
In the gift shop after our tour, I stocked up on books by Neruda and a Neruda-style cap for my husband. But our visit to La Chascona had left me wanting more — not of the poetry so much as the man and his houses.
We had planned to spend the remainder of our trip in Santiago. But upon learning that Neruda had two other homes that he and Matilde occupied — simultaneously — over the last 20 years of his lifetime, I became a woman possessed. I suggested to Jim (no, there was more urgency than that) that we add to our itinerary a pilgrimage to those other houses — one, La Sebastiana, in the city of Valparaíso; the other, Casa de Isla Negra, a couple of hours from there, on the rocky Chilean coast.
It’s one of the things I love best when traveling: those moments your well-made plans and itineraries get tossed aside for a spur-of-the-moment expedition to explore some place you never even knew existed, until you were there.
An hour later, we had the whole thing arranged: a rental car to take us to Valparaíso. A hotel room for one night. To be followed, after our visit to La Sebastiana, by a drive to Isla Negra.
Jim loves to drive, and to drive fast, and so our chosen vehicle was a top-of-the-line BMW 285 M convertible. We were hot on the Neruda trail now, or at least I was, with Jim at the wheel. It was a romantic quest, in a way (“Two for the Road,” minus Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn). I wanted to see all three of the houses where the relationship between Pablo and Matilde had played out. But really what I wanted to know were the stories of the two who had inhabited them.
The drive to Valparaíso took us through gorgeous countryside, including many Chilean wineries. Twenty miles down the highway, with the sky threatening rain, we gave up on our top-down experience, but even so, I liked to imagine how it must have been for Pablo and Matilde, leaving behind their beloved home in the capital for the new place high on a hill known as Florida, overlooking the crazy port city of Valparaíso where no streets seem to run parallel to each other and many are one-way, though lacking the signs to tell you this.
La Sebastiana was purchased in 1959 from the estate of an architect, Sebastián Collado, who had died before construction was completed, and for whom the house is named. While Neruda bought La Chascona on his own, as a surprise for his lover, he and Matilde (now his third wife) bought La Sebastiana together. They celebrated its opening in 1961 with one of their famous dinner parties, and later with New Year’s celebrations where friends gathered to watch fireworks over the harbor.
We spent an afternoon and night exploring Valparaíso — enough time for Jim to characterize the place as an intoxicating mix of New Orleans and San Francisco’s Mission District, combined with a little of the Latin Quarter in Paris: pisco sours in a dive bar playing ’30s jazz; cobbled streets winding down to the water; murals and funiculars and pots spilling over with flowers; dogs in the road.
Next morning, we made our way to La Sebastiana. As with La Chascona, this Neruda home features an entryway of tangled greenery and mosaic walkways, hidden gardens, staircases, low doors and ceilings that give a person the feeling of being on a ship — which was precisely Neruda’s idea. Though he never took an interest in being at the helm of a boat, the nautical themes are everywhere in his houses.
Here, too, is a whole room dedicated to a bar, and a dining table set with more colored glasses, and a dressing table for Matilde and, at the foot of the bed, a toy sheep purchased by Neruda, late in life, to replace one he had loved and lost as a motherless child decades earlier.
There’s a carousel horse and a music box and a collection of wooden ships, and maps (one dating from the 17th century). As always, Neruda has made himself a wonderful writing room, filled with photographs of the poet with his many famous friends (Picasso and Marcel Marceau, among them) and his writer heroes (Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman), along with pictures from the day in 1971 when he received the Nobel Prize.
As in his other houses, the office features a collection of bronze hands, and a sink beside the desk so he could indulge his habit of washing his hands before getting to work on his day’s writing. His houses make plain: If the poet had an insatiable appetite for food, and love, and ships’ models, and wine, he also possessed a strong work ethic.
He wrote in the early hours. The afternoons were reserved for seeing friends and hunting down treasures, a fact that left me imagining what a collector like Neruda would have done had eBay existed in his time. More bronze hands and ship paintings, perhaps. Fewer poems.
With one day left before our flight home, we got back in the BMW, tearing off to the coast to the last Neruda house, with the plan of touring it that afternoon, then racing back to the city to board our plane. We were cutting it close (which allowed Jim to experience the BMW at 120 miles an hour during one impressive moment of passing), but compulsion had taken over now.
The route to Isla Negra goes through a series of small towns before reaching the coast. Even when we arrived there, we had a hard time finding the house. No signs announce its presence in this unexceptional little beach town filled with cheap restaurants and souvenir shops.
On the advice of a local taxi driver, we made our way down a dirt road a half-mile or so outside of town. Then there it was, on a pile of rocks overlooking a stretch of ocean so wild Jim had to raise his voice for me to hear. Neruda’s favorite house: Isla Negra.
This was the house he had purchased for his wife, Delia del Carril (nicknamed La Hormiguita, the Little Ant). He was looking, he said, for a place to write his “Canto General.” But, it could be argued, a person doesn’t need a roomful of ships in bottles and a few hundred glass bottles to write a canto.
“I write for a land recently dried, recently fresh with flowers, pollen, mortar,” he wrote in “Canto General.” “I write for some craters whose chalk cupolas repeat the round void beside the pure snow. …”
Here again are the bar and the great dining table, the vast fireplace and deep soft chairs (overlooking the roiling Pacific this time), the writing room, the romantic bedroom reached by a special flight of steps — two bedrooms actually; when Pablo Neruda divorced Delia and married Matilde, the new love required a new room. At Isla Negra, the landlubber Neruda indulged his love of maritime objects more than in either of the other houses, with a dozen female ships’ figureheads jutting from the walls of the living room.
Neruda celebrated the Chilean Independence Day here with his many friends every Sept. 18. It was here where he received the news of the coup that removed his socialist ally Salvador Allende from power in September 1973, and of Allende’s suicide that same day.
And it was here — just three weeks later — where he spent his last night with Matilde, before being taken to the hospital where he died a few days later. The cause of death was reported as prostate cancer, but the Interior Ministry of Chile recently released a
statement saying that it was highly probable that Neruda’s death “was caused by a third-party intervention.”
After his death, Matilde never spent another night at Isla Negra; she returned instead to Santiago to end her days at La Chascona. First, though, she had to rebuild the house, that — like the town — was looted and wrecked by members of the military following the coup.
A person visiting the houses now would not guess that so many of Neruda’s carefully assembled treasures and furnishings had been smashed and burned in those first days. Photographs displayed on the home’s walls from the aftermath tell the story — of the destruction, of the thousands who took to the streets after his death to mourn their beloved poet. There in the photographs, among the mourning masses, is Matilde herself — hair concealed under a black veil. She died of cancer 10 years later and is buried at Isla Negra beside her husband.
On the plane home, I took out the volumes of poetry I had picked up at the gift shop at La Chascona. One was a collection featuring the “Twenty Poems of Love” I knew so well, and the verses Neruda published, anonymously, in celebration of his love for Matilde during the early ’50s when their relationship was a secret.
The other was a hefty 843-page tome with every one of Neruda’s odes, in Spanish on one side of the page, English on the other (“Ode to an Artichoke.” “Ode to the Dictionary.” “Ode to Walt Whitman.” “Ode to My Suit”: “Every morning, suit, you are waiting on a chair to be filled by my vanity, my love, my hope, my body.”) It’s fitting, for this poet who so loved material objects, less for their value, I think, than for what they represented, that he wrote 225 of these odes.
I’m no poet, and no poetry critic, but I found myself thinking, as I flew north over South America with my backpack full of Neruda, that not all of these poems are so great or memorable. The poet may have been served better writing a little less. Just as it may be said that his wonderful houses could contain one tenth the number of amazing treasures, and they’d still be wonderful places to behold. More so, maybe.
But who am I to criticize a great poet for the excess, as I make my way back to a house filled with ample evidence of my own obsessive collecting? I know as well as the next person that it’s dust to dust in the end. All a person takes with him to the grave are his bones.
But in the middle, between birth and death, I’d call it a glorious thing, to raise one’s red Mexican glass at a fine round table set with gilt-edged china, while candles flicker and the music box plays, and the host sports a fez, and his beautiful redheaded wife whispers words of love in his ear. There’s a string of rare pearls around her neck, and a ship’s figurehead of a woman with her breasts spilling from her bodice, over the assembled guests, while outside, fireworks explode over a roaring sea.
IF YOU GO
Admission for each of Pablo Neruda’s three houses is 5,000 pesos, about $7.30 (student and senior discounts are available). They all offer audio guides in English, and each is closed on Monday.
La Chascona (Fernando Márquez de la Plata 0192, Barrio Bellavista, Providencia, Santiago, 56-2-2777-8741; fundacionneruda.org) takes its name, “Wild Hair,” from the nickname of Neruda’s then-secret lover, Matilde Urrutia. It sits on a side street on a high hill in Santiago, at the foot of Cerro San Cristóbal, overlooking the city. Ransacked after the coup that removed Salvador Allende from power, the house has now been fully restored.
La Sebastiana (Ferrari 692, Valparaíso, 56-32-225-6606; fundacionneruda.org) sits high on a hill, overlooking the bay and the city of Valparaíso. Neruda invited his friends here every September to watch the fireworks marking the celebration of Chile’s independence.
Isla Negra (Poeta Neruda s/n, Isla Negra, El Quisco, 56-35-2461284; fundacionneruda.org), on the rocky coastline just over an hour south of Valparaíso, is where Neruda and Matilde chose to be buried — though after his death, she could not bring herself to return. The drive to Isla Negra, from Valparaíso, allows for visits to a number of fine Chilean vineyards. Well worth the stop, for those who have time.
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